You know Martin Shkreli, right? The guy who has dominated the news for nearly four months now? The world's most hated pharmaceutical executive?The Shkrel Man first came to public attention for increasing the price of a drug used to treat AIDS more than 55-fold overnight, tweeting "lol" at Hilary Clinton when she asked him to cut the cost back, and for being a bit of an emo (he was revealed to have invested in Collect Records). About a week ago he was named as the buyer of Wu-Tang Clan's one-off $2 million album, and then he spent an entire smug day live streaming his life on YouTube to disillusioned Wu-Tang fans while he made a list of artists he might pay to make an album just for him. Then, yesterday, in a desperate bid to improve his public persona, he claimed to be in the process of bailing Bobby Shmurda out of jail. Basically, Shkreli's list of accomplishments in the last few months has been so thoroughly heinous that even Donald Trump called him a “spoiled brat."Now, in a fresh new twist to events, the 32-year-old has been arrested on securities and fraud charges. He is suspected of plundering a firm he founded to pay off personal debts. What a guy, huh? Bloomberg reports:"The federal case against him has nothing to do with pharmaceutical costs, however. Prosecutors charged him with illegally taking stock from Retrophin Inc., a biotechnology firm he started in 2011, and using it pay off debts from unrelated business dealings. He was later ousted from the company, where he’d been chief executive officer, and sued by its board.In the case that closely tracks that suit, federal prosecutors accused Shkreli of engaging in a complicated shell game after his defunct hedge fund, MSMB Capital Management, lost millions. He is alleged to have made secret payoffs and set up sham consulting arrangements."Read the full report on Bloomberg here.If you, quite rightly, struggle to imagine what a day in the life of Martin Shkreli must be like, we wrote a fan fiction piece about it here.
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